Los Angeles to pay for job training for gang members

Published 3:34 pm, Thursday, March 17, 2016

LOS ANGELES — The city of Los Angeles will pay as much as $30 million to assist thousands of people who were subjected to unlawful curfews included in city gang injunctions.

The money, which will be used primarily to provide job training for gang members, is the centerpiece of an agreement to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the Los Angeles Police Department of enforcing curfews written into many gang injunctions for years after they were struck down as unconstitutional.

The City Council voted unanimously this week to approve the deal. The judge in the lawsuit must still approve the settlement.

Nearly 50 injunctions are in place in some of the city’s roughest neighborhoods. The injunctions are court orders that seek to severely curtail gang activity by, among other things, prohibiting gang members and their associates from socializing with one another, carrying weapons or wearing certain clothing inside an injunction’s designated area that typically encompasses the neighborhoods where the gangs are active.

Contending with gangs

Although gang crime has climbed recently, the city has made large gains over the past decade in tamping down gang violence, drug dealing and other crimes. Officials credit the injunctions with playing a large role in that progress.

But in 2011, Los Angeles attorney Olu Orange filed a federal lawsuit challenging curfew provisions included in 21 of the city injunctions that prohibited people from being outside after 10 p.m. The terms of the curfews, Orange argued, were so broad and vague as to be illegal.

Police and city officials, Orange said at the time, were willfully ignoring a 2007 ruling by a California appeals court that found a similar curfew in another city violated individuals’ due process rights. In that ruling, the court found an injunction against an Oxnard (Ventura County) gang did not adequately define what it meant for someone to be “outside” during the hours of the curfew.

The wording was “so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning,” the court found.

The lawsuit filed by Orange stemmed from the arrest of Christian Rodriguez, a teenager who was neither a member nor an associate of a gang. He was included in the injunction because of an older brother’s ties to a gang, Orange said.

LAPD antigang officers arrested Rodriguez in June 2009 when they found him outside with friends at a housing project’s handball courts. He was charged only with violating the curfew.

End of curfews

The criminal charges against Rodriguez were dropped and in 2012 police officials ordered officers to stop enforcing the illegal curfews. Orange nonetheless pursued a broader class-action case on behalf of anyone arrested for violating the curfews.

The case dragged through the courts for years. Eventually the two sides agreed to the idea of the city helping to fund nonprofit organizations that, in turn, can provide services to people improperly arrested for curfew violations.

The amount the city will end up paying into the fund depends on how many people come forward. Any of the roughly 5,700 people covered by the gang injunctions challenged in the lawsuit are eligible to receive funds, even if they were not arrested for curfew violations.

Under the terms of the deal, the city must commit at least $4.5 million and as much as $30 million over the next four years to nonprofit groups. The money will pay for gang members and associates included in the lawsuit’s class to attend job training classes and apprenticeship programs. Some of the funds will be earmarked for programs that remove gang tattoos.